Cautious, a Boat Adrift, page 5
Ned leaned forward. “What’s that?”
Micheál laughed. “I need a piss.” He left his listeners at the bar and disappeared into the crowd.
“Chuffin’ ’eck”, Terry frowned. “Where’d thee find that fella, Norman? High Royds Hospital?”
“Never realised how much of a mad bastard he wuh”, said Ned.
“None of that”, Norman scolded. “I know this is the first time you’ve met him, but you’ll get used to him. He’s a bit different, but that’s areet. He dun’t have to keep Florrie and I a secret from his folks, but he does. I owe him for now.”
“He must get it from his father”, Ned continued. “Odd man, him. Never know whether yer coming or going with him.”
“Well, keep yer lips buttoned”, Norman hissed. “It’s nowt to do with thee, so dun’t pry into his family life again.”
Ned’s eyes had drifted off once more to the same blonde woman, who was now stood drinking a bottle of milk stout by the door of the lounge. Terry said nothing but drained his half pint and belched into his hand. Four men waded through the crowd behind Ned. Ned was still wearing Micheál’s hat. The bask of men moved closer. Three of them, chosen for their height, were mammoths that dwarfed the room. Strongmen plucked from folklore. The fourth planted his hand on Ned’s shoulder.
“Is he bothering thee, Micheál?” Jack Wrigley asked the boy in the milkman’s hat. He was looking directly at Norman. Before Ned could turn his head, Jack had stepped forward and landed a punch between Norman’s eyes.
The room erupted. Norman dropped from his stool, knocking an old man down in the process. Jack turned, expecting Micheál’s praise, but, to his surprise, found himself being lamped by Ned. The three strongmen started forward, but two were pulled back by Terry and swung over a table. Suddenly Norman was back up and fending off the third, and the old man that Norman had knocked was grappling with Jack, forcing his head into a chokehold. As the two giants splayed across the table clambered to their feet, a steelworker realised they had spilt his wife’s port and lemon and preceded to drag the offenders to the floor by their hair. The young comedian in the trawlerman’s raincoat poked his head back inside to retrieve his hat and was immediately punched back out.
Norman was, by this time, seeing red. The scarlet curtains. Contorted faces of claret. The bottoms of the pint glasses were ruby with blood, the confetti of glass about him all scarlet. Jack had shed himself of the old man’s headlock and, with the help of the third strongman, wrestled Norman to the floor. Kneeling on Norman’s chest, Jack’s fist rose and fell, methodically. He set about his work as he would in the foundry. He was punching the hierarchy of age into Norman. Men above boys. He was enjoying himself. His fist rose and fell, like the stoic boot that brought retribution to the indulgent woodlouse. He was delivering a parable. The vermin of intemperance would be run out of Hunslet, mowed down where they danced. The milk bars would be gutted. The rowing boats would be sunk.
Norman could feel his brain shifting back in his skull. His nose was broken. The bone was pressing up against his skin. His muscles loosened. He seemed to be levitating. The dark, sickly carpet lay patiently below him. Above, a phantom hand, whether Jack’s or his father’s, hung like a star. This was the hand blind men followed down the river. In their twos and threes, they followed it — good Christians, good, blind sods — to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Soon, to be handless would be celebrated. It would be expected of all men. The phantom hands were the invisible architects. They constructed the state without complaint or comment. Left, right, left, right.
Then, the third strongman slumped forward. A boot collided with Jack’s face. It happened slowly. Norman had entered a space beyond sound. He could hear nothing, yet as his head rolled sideways, he could make out Micheál, red all over, brandishing a hammer. The crowds were clearing into the fringes of vision. Jack’s other two accomplices had vanished, leaving Ned, unconscious, stretched out on the floor. Terry was shaking Norman’s shoulders. He shook him like Norman’s mother did when waking him for work. “Not now”, Norman mouthed, “I’m dreaming.”
Micheál was crouched, his hammer inches from Jack’s face. He was saying something Norman couldn’t decipher. A farmer warning a volatile horse. A soothsayer telling of the blackness on the other side of the moon. Words that can never be known. A steady, unaccountable glow emitted from Micheál. The landscape shifted around it. Moths fell. People scrambled through to the door and disappeared inside the glow. It was a hazy, foreboding sort of thing, but strangely comforting. Norman wondered if he were the only one who could see it. Did Micheál know it was there, and what would he do with it if he found out? Would he try to scrub it away in the bath or would he laugh it off and walk down the street looking like that? Perhaps Micheál already knew about the glow and would be angry if he discovered that Norman had seen it. All sound had evacuated from it. All light succumbed to the vacuum of it. Norman put his hand out and somebody touched it. All was red, then black.
May 2017 (IV)
It was all vapid. Fuck the bastard lot of them.
Lying on the sofa the next morning, I thumbed through the copy of the Daily Monotony that Wayne had left behind in the kitchen. A rag saturated with celebrity gossip, spin-doctoring and right-wing reactionary opinion pieces. An early-Noughties pop singer had been pictured working as a travel guide in Spain, sporting a white-hot blazer and shorts. A Polish plumber had charged a grandma two grand to unblock her sink. I just bought my second home, and you can too! A man who feared crushing his wife in bed had shed three stone in four years. The Tory MP who smiled at me. Vouchers for Iceland and Boots. One bingo advert, two, three. I flipped through to the back pages. Leeds United had finished seventh in the championship, having been slapped by Burton and Norwich City and drawn with Wigan Athletic. Chelsea had won the Premier League, having trounced West Brom, Watford and Sunderland. Bastards.
I woke up early every day. It had once been a labour, but now it was a matter of habit. I did not do lie-ins. They made me feel like the day had been extracted out of me before I had even peeled the shaving cream from my face. Between five and seven in the morning was my solitary period. Sometimes I would spend the time flipping through yesterday’s news, sometimes attempting to read the classics in an effort to secure holy cultural capital, the ability to avoid embarrassment amongst the bigwigs I might find myself rubbing shoulders with one day. Despite this, Middlemarch remained unfinished and Jane Eyre barely touched after nearly two years festering on my bedside table. I was no one’s fool, however. I had mulled over some chapters of the Williams, Jameson and Eagleton books Norman had showed me in my early twenties. They had stuck with me. I had read my Barthes, my Baudrillard, my Lyotard — in part anyway. I had liked Lyotard until Libidinal Economy. After dropping that text (from a third-floor window), I had contemplated trying Heidegger, whom I had heard of but never read and truthfully knew nothing about. After looking up Heidegger online, I decided most philosophers were wankers, and sacked off my morning reading habits for a while. Due to this, more recently during my early hours of solitude I instead planned whatever tripe I would turn out that day at the Herald. On the morning in question, I had succumbed to the Daily Monotony partly to discover how it had changed since I was a teenager, if at all. Back then, the opening pages of the newspaper, exhibiting photos of topless glamour models, would be torn out by grubby hands at the off-licence and paraded around school by a pandemonium of boys, echoing whichever bawdy phrases they had found in the paper, memorising them. The topless section had been replaced with one or two photos of lingerie models, but other than that it remained much the same kindling.
The other reason I had picked up the Daily Monotony was due to my insatiable need to feel angry. I had realised that I hadn’t been truly seething for several months, and perhaps was not furious more often than a few times throughout the average year. It was not that there was nothing to be angry about. There was an abundance of that, and it was important to measure out just how much vexatious material I exposed myself to, so as not to overdo it. No. The rarity of my fury was, if anything, due to a feeling of inexact numbness which had been gradually making itself at home under my skin throughout the latter part of my twenties. Now, at twenty-nine, I seemed void of noticeable sensations and emotions for longer periods than I once had been, sometimes for as long as a week. This was a popular numbness. My housemates had also felt it from time to time, and it was becoming increasingly autonomous within their bodies also.
I lived in a rented ex-council house in Bulwell with a taxman who worked by Nottingham train station, a bouncer at the PRYZM nightclub on Lower Parliament Street and a barista who had made cappuccinos in Costa, Starbucks and Caffè Nero for most of her adult life. The taxman and the barista had been to university but the benefits of their degrees in sociology and fine art were yet to kick in. This was something that caused them disgruntlement but little noticeable anger. It made me somewhat glad that I had sacked off university myself. I had spent the decade since leaving sixth form in a string of meaningless retail and bar jobs, signing onto jobseeker’s when the work dried up, spending the majority of what I earned on cheap lager and, occasionally, spirits. I had stopped smoking when I racked up two grand’s worth of debt to my landlord, despite this being the time I wanted cigarettes the most, and finally had landed a job at the Herald, scarcely able to believe my luck at finding salaried employment in a field that interested me. Since then, however, that interest had gradually waned, as more and more stories of human boredom found themselves designated to me to report. This was when the numbness had become discernible.
It was perhaps a numbness born from stasis, but surely this was due to my own stasis, having never left Nottingham, rather than the stasis of the city itself. The city and the country, after all, were always transforming — transforming so swiftly and yet so gradually that you could be forgiven for not noticing the changes until they had taken place. The defilement of anything recognisable. Buildings, icons and cultural reminders were flattened overnight and replaced by unsullied new builds, by images of a surgical cleanliness, by mirages. Evidence of such a project could be found across the country. Even in Hunslet the landscape had been restructured. It was no more Norman’s land than that of the southern architect. Density had made way for space, for sterilisation. In place of what was there were cul-de-sacs, apartments rising in price, motorways, corporate branding, supermarkets and shades of bleached grey, cream and beige. The red bricks had been carried away without a trace. The problem here was that these transformations, even if sinister, were seemingly mundane. In the de-characterised terrain, eventually unrecognisable to itself, the nefarious had become prosaic, revealing itself in such dull ways that it was not worth the hassle of anger. It did not feel the need to hide. The wicked could be seen whenever you took your bins out, and you would yawn at the sight of it. Despite incessant erosion and remapping, an air of predictability hung thick in the air. Well, you might think, if you’re going to burn it all down, at least make it worth stepping outside to see.
I flung the newspaper onto the armchair opposite and turned to the TV. Beryl Blanc, the pop star responsible for forty glitzy songs with “love” in their titles, was holding her new lip gloss. A sensual sigh rose in exhalation and the words Oh-So Blanc ran across the screen in joined-up script. Next, two green-haired disciples from the latest post-punk, post-electronic outfit appeared on a trainer commercial karate-kicking the air. An indiscernible instrument wailed. BE SUBVERSIVE, the brand demanded. Be subversive so we can absorb your dissent and sell it back to you as products.
I rose, yawned, sat down again, then decided against it, and switched off the TV, for the day had started, cars were coughing into life and the postman was already being chased by a dog.
At Salter and Son Funeral Directors, Mr Salter sat, chameleon-like, his pasty greening skin blending into the faded botanical wallpaper behind him. He was, if anything, the last of the Victorians. His pallid jacket hung from his malnourished body like a cloak. His eyes were colourless. Anything he ate was barren of flavour. He had wandered out of a flat world and, when his side profile was seen, he seemed near flat himself. “You can see her if you like.” He gestured to a door at the rear of the office. Norman, hungover and still unwashed, chewed his saliva and nodded.
Brenda’s funeral was to be on the coming Monday. She would be set alight at the Cottingley Hall crematorium. It would, in fairness to Sherry, be best to have the service as soon as possible. That way, she and Wayne could vanish quickly and leave Mam and I to our own devices, leave Norman to his own home, leave the lights to be turned on again.
It would not help Norman to see Brenda again but there was little that could be done to stop him. He walked like a man possessed towards the door and the younger funeral director, assumedly the “son” of Salter and Son, his face that of a permanently frowning toad, moved aside. Mam and I followed.
Brenda had her eyes closed, thankfully. She did not look at peace. Her face, whilst resting, appeared clenched in frustration. She looked like she could erupt at any moment, shouting at the ceiling, making it tremble above her. She was not pale. Spray-on tan still stained her fleshy body. Her red nail varnish was chipped but not quite gone. If she was, at that moment, in conversation with the afterlife, it was not obvious whether she was staring down hell or heaven. Norman shuddered, from emotion or fear. Mam put her arm around him.
“She’s with God now”, the son of Salter lied.
There was a moment’s hush. Mam mumbled something, the Lord’s Prayer. Then Norman removed her arm from him and whispered to her. “Let me just… have a moment alone.”
Mam nodded and we withdrew. We waited in the office. The son of Salter poured Mam a glass of warm tap water. Salter busied himself with paperwork at his desk, seemingly having forgotten we were there. I studied the burgundy, the russet, the artichoke green of the botanical wallpaper. The walls were decked with flowers. Flat flowers, flat prayers and flat yesterdays barely remembered. On the other side of the door, Norman could be heard in low tones, telling Brenda a story. The narrative itself could not be made out, but Norman began it as he began most of his stories. “There once was a man…”
We walked through the city centre on the way home, flagged on either side by the multinational fast-food chains, the American sandwich rackets, the mobile phone conglomerates, the internet moguls, the faux-French coffee giants and the sportswear empires. Shoppers in their thousands, a phantasmagoria, passed through, stacked high, the colours of their clothing smearing the air. They were indistinguishable, melting into one another, emerging from each other’s limbs, vanishing behind each other’s heads.
Waiters, waitresses and chefs with thick Yorkshire accents exploded out of the Italian restaurant to smoke, compare tips and mock their manager. Angry boys sauntered in puffer jackets in twenty-five-degree heat, their faces childlike beneath the anonymity of hoods. Bronzed girls gathered at the McDonalds to plan a getaway to Zante and reality-show-made gym lads crossed the road to talk to them, leaving at the bus stop a red-faced man in a Hawaiian shirt littered with St. George’s Crosses. A bucket hat and a string vest shot past on a bike, drum and bass tumbling from a portable speaker. An open-top BMW was stuck behind a malfunctioning Renault Clio at the green light. A megabus sounded its horn, its mascot waving embarrassedly at the scene of disruption. A man stood like a flagpole, three scarves draped over him, murder hanging from his face.
The gutted and refurbished Kirkgate Market watched on, its towers and turrets sweating under the sun. Inside, the stench of raw cod swam from Eskimo Joe’s fishmongers to the Phone Clinic, to Baobab Tree and Brown’s sweetshop, clung to the wigs of Dimples Hair and Cosmetics. The sun’s heat seemed to intensify every year. This was something to be celebrated. Should the bricks of the ex-industrial buildings one day melt away, the bustling crowds below would receive them as rain, would strip down to let the dust flow over them.
– SAFETY MESSAGE:
PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PUSH THESE DOORS OPEN
– Radical exit.
– U Ok, hun?
– I hold up the scales of the last salmon.
– I have got the shell of the last oyster.
– Down, boy, down! It’s only a busker!
– A lot of policies that really went out of fashion in the 1980s.
– LEEDS. THE FOODIE CAPITAL OF THE NORTH ☼
– A Northern League team have had their pitch rolled up and stolen overnight.
– Shame it wun’t Garry Monk they fookin’ pinched.
– OFFICE SPACE TO LET.
– The Sun, in which you wrote this article,
had to provide a translation of your words for its readers.
– BEAUTFIUL SPACIOUS OFFICE SPACE.
– How do you confuse a Man U fan?
– How?
– Show him a map of Manchester.
– SPACE SPACE SPACE.
– Broken promise. Three hundred and fifty million.
– The War of the Roses never ended.
– Broken promise. Yer said we could have chippy tea!
– We are having chippy tea.
– The chips at home in’t same!
– I don’t mind asylum seekers. I really don’t.
But they’re stealing our Polish folks’ jobs!
– GOT A HUNCH? WE’LL MATCH YOUR FIRST BET!
BET £2 TO MAKE TWO HUNDRED!
WhenthefunstopsstopPleasegambleresponsibly.
– Commie bastard. He wants to take us back to the ’70s.
I never did like flares.
– Less business for bossman.
– Thank you. Please come again. ☺
– Terrorist sympathiser. Makes strawberry jam with ISIS.
– That wuh the textiles factory me mam
